1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control apparatus that performs printing with two or more different graphics engines, a control method thereof, and a device driver.
2. Description of the Related Art
A technique for efficiently developing a printer driver that supports a plurality of operating systems by converting drawing commands in a first operating system (OS) and those in a second operating system into OS-independent common spool data and then transferring the OS-independent common spool data to a common renderer for the operating systems to create print commands, is described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-110151.
Microsoft corporation announced the outlines of a next-generation printing system (NextGen Print Path, which is hereinafter referred to as NGPP) at WinHEC, the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference, in 2004 in Seattle, U.S.A.
The NGPP is a Microsoft's next-generation printing system that natively supports Avalon, which is a new graphics engine that will replace the graphics device interface (GDI). In the NGPP, as to the spool format of print jobs, the GDI-based enhanced metafile (hereinafter, referred to as EMF) is replaced with a new file format (NextGen Spool File, which is hereinafter referred to as NGSF).
FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram for the explanation of print paths, including the NGPP.
In FIG. 3, the NGPP is a new print path, and the GDI print path is a previous print path. In a case where no NGPP driver is present, a NextGen conversion print path is used. This relationship shows the following:
(1) An Avalon application 303 uses an NGPP driver 304, as indicated from the upper right to the lower right portion of the Figure.
(2) A Win32 application 301 uses a GDI driver 302, as indicated from the upper left to the lower left portion of the Figure.
(3) If the NGPP driver 304 is not present, the Avalon application 303 uses the GDI driver 302 through the NextGen conversion print path, as indicated from the upper right to the lower left.
In other words, the GDI driver 302 is necessary to cope with both applications, whereas the NGPP driver 304 is optional.
In the future, corporations that develop a printer driver will adopt a strategy of investing in the development of the NGPP without investing in that of the GDI print path. However, the printing system described above requires the development of the GDI driver, and therefore, the investment for development of the GDI print path cannot be avoided. It is thus easily conceivable that this investment will put an enormous load on each corporation's development costs.
The present invention is aimed to overcome, at least in part, such a drawback.